Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Get Home” by Jeff Parent.

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Get Home

By Jeff Parent

On that some late-day, overcast,

you wink in where the end of the battle began

out by the house your grandfather built,

where he fed all those shocked men.

Watch them turn him out

with bayonet points

and bandaged hands

for some wrongheaded notion of gold, or God,

or some untraceable sorcery lost in your skittish data

decompiling into a fevered aura

of homesickness and animal fear

from the strain of history;

back older than an unbidden memory of Dad,

of him saying,

“Something’ll get ya,

one way or the other,”

quietly, over minute-steak and coffee,

with the canker sores to prove it.

And, when the science fiction abandons you,

listen for…

for a telephone

is the best advice I can give you,

or a locomotive,

and head for that.

Head for that,

that you might find

some line home.

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Copyright © Jeff Parent

Previously published in The Mitre, the Bishop’s University Literary Journal 126th edition, and This Bygone Route (The/tƐmz/Review, 2020). First appeared in Poetry Pause on July 31, 2020.

Originally from Montréal, Jeff Parent is a dad, and increasingly disaffected poem-writing guy. A graduate of Concordia University’s Creative Writing MA program, his poems have been published in a perfectly respectable variety of print journals, collections, and online outlets. His first chapbook, This Bygone Route, was published in 2020 by 845 Press (The/tƐmz/Review). Jeff and his family currently reside in Nova Scotia. He finds biographical statements tedious and excessive.

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